About QCC

Qcc Mission Statement

Founded in 1993, Qcc is a multiracial community-building organization that fosters the artistic, economic and cultural development of San Francisco’s LGBT community. We implement our mission by operating programs that commission and present Queer artists, that promote the development of culturally diverse Queer arts organizations and that document significant Queer arts events taking place in San Francisco.

By presenting, exhibiting, screening and documenting queer artists’ work, Qcc contributes to the development of a multicultural perspective on the Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender experience.

QCC stages an annual month-long multidisciplinary National Queer Arts Festival, documents significant Bay Area Queer arts events on our Website, provides fundraising and other technical assistance services to emerging culturally-specific and gender-specific Queer arts groups, and conducts “Creating Queer Community,” a program that to date has commissioned more than 60 San Francisco-based artists to create new work.

QCC’ began operating “Creating Queer Community” in 2000 by awarding 5 small commissions ranging from $500 to $1500. Since then, QCC has commissioned approximately 60 LGBT artists to create new works that authentically express our community’s diverse experiences. Over the past seven years, the vast majority of these commissions have been awarded to culturally-specific and gender-specific individual artists whose work expresses the experiences of queers of color, Lesbians and Transgendered people. The commissioned work has broadened the Queer community’s understanding of the fluid nature of racial and gender identities and has provided many insights into what people of different races, gender identities and ages actually think. QCC has received major grants from the Haas Foundations’ Creative Work Fund, the Gerbode Foundation and the San Francisco Foundation to expand our commissioning activities.

Queer Multicultural Arts Development (QMAD)

In 1999, when QCC initiated the Queer Multicultural Arts Development (QMAD) program, almost all City arts funds went to LGBT groups founded during the seventies by gay white men; Lesbian artists received less than two-tenths of one percent of the City’s arts dollars; arts organizations presenting work expressing the lives and experiences of Queers of color and transgendered people received no public funding at all. Since its inception, QMAD’s affordable grantwriting assistance program has enabled Lesbian, Transgender and Queer arts organizations of color to secure government and foundation grants exceeding $725,000. The diversification of San Francisco’s LGBT arts community has significantly changed the City’s cultural landscape: it has built bridges across the many divides that formerly separated our inherently diverse community and has moved formerly marginalized Queer artists of color, Lesbians and Transgendered people into the mainstream of LGBT cultural production.

QueerCulturalCenter.org

www.queerculturalcenter.org, one of the most heavily visited non-profit arts websites in the Bay Area, documents important Queer arts events taking place in San Francisco and heightens the international, national, statewide and local visibility of the Bay Area’s Queer arts community. For the past nine years, Website Director Rudy Lemcke has developed on-line content that makes the creative work of the City’s Queer artists accessible to audiences throughout the world. The Website currently contains over 11,000 pages of material that traces the emergence, diversification and ongoing evolution of Queer arts and culture in San Francisco over the past 9 years. The website is now a major on-line resource for information about Queer art and artists; last year, the website attracted over 720,000 international visitors.

Healthy Community Arts Program

QCC launched our first season of year-round presentations and staged a series of approximately 25 arts programs in the Castro neighborhood of San Francisco, exploring medical and mental health issues such as living with life threatening diseases, amphetamine abuse and working in the sex-industry.

Queer Converstions on Culture and the Arts (QCCA)

Queer Conversations on Culture and the Arts brings together locally and nationally renowned artists, writers, filmmakers, and scholars for a series of conversations to discuss a broad range of LGBTQI topics in the humanities and the arts.